Another excerpt from this draft of The Undressing of America. A section break follows the previous part, in which Tony Comstock shoots the mad dog and busts up the saloon, and then...
When his brother died at Gettysburg, Tony’s extended family expected him to enlist to take his place—that’s what good New Englanders did—but for seven months Tony ignored the call. His brother’s death seems not to have affected him terribly; lifelong Tony would bond strongly with women, especially women like his mother and sisters, whom he could protect or depended on him, but he built no strong ties with other men. He also showed little interest in the war itself, or in any political or moral issues beyond his local battles. He finally went off to war in the spring of 1864, with the Confederacy already in retreat.
Like any Congregationalist, the young Comstock saw slavery as an evil, but the battle for abolition seems to have been too abstract for him to care much about it. In the diary he kept during his year of service, he never mentioned the larger issues of the war and tripped lightly over the tiny bit of action he saw, instead writing mainly of his relentless efforts to organize prayer meetings and urge his fellow soldiers to attend. He was frequently “twitted” for lecturing his fellows on the evils of alcohol and nicotine, and once rather violently hazed, but he never stopped. Usually he enjoyed arguing and took a special satisfaction in calmly standing his ground when vastly outnumbered. He railed against his own weakness when he fell into wrath or self pity over the twits and insults of these men who knew not what they did.
When the war ended, Tony returned to Connecticut, but there was little there now to hold him. His sisters were growing up, he was not close to his extended family, and he had no real friendships. His closest bond had always been with his mother Polly, the one person he believed had loved him truly and completely. When the judgment of New Canaan had descended on the family for his father’s inconstancy, it was Polly who had protected him. He often said that her memory was his most constant companion, and that when he fought to defend the innocent he wanted to give them the protection his mother had given him. But having let other relatives take over the family farm during the war, his last physical connection to her had been severed. A year after the war, jobless and nearly penniless, he asked a family friend for help.
No young man with Tony’s energy should stay in Connecticut, the man said. In the wake of the war, too many men were competing for too few jobs. But a great boom was coming. Huge industries had been springing up before the war, and now they would be making up for lost time. The West about to be opened: the two ends of the transcontinental railroad had stretched to within a few hundred miles of one another. Any young with ambition should be heading for the center of the nation’s business and finance: New York City. The man even offered to give Tony money to stake him. He could only afford five dollars, but that was more than Tony had. And so, in the summer of 1866, the twenty-two year old Tony Comstock arrived in America’s biggest city with three dollars and forty cents in his pocket.
Very quickly, he discovered that other young men had left Connecticut for New York, and countless others had left every other state in the union. There were jobs, but there were men lined up for every one. After days of dogged searching he secured a place as a shipping clerk at a dry goods company. Unable to afford to live in New York itself, he had to take a cheap room in the neighboring city of Brooklyn and commute by ferry.
Nothing in Comstock’s life had prepared him for New York City.
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